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 We were fortunate enough to be able to participate to the Thursday private track day held by Hotlaps/Golo Racing, which turned out to be a good thing as it gave us a heads up on the setup for the weekend.
Friday morning was the official start to the national series weekend. First session of the day was Pro Sportbike, everything went great in that session, Louie was 13th fastest overall. Next up on the morning schedule was Pro Superbike just before lunch. Unfortunatly during that session Louie had a mishap in corner 1, which on that circuit is a very quick right hander. Some minor damage on the bike & a pretty sore rider as a result of the fall.
We quickly repaired the bike & prepared our 2nd bike for the afternoon Pro Sportbike session which was 1st following lunch. Louie got back in the midst of things quite quickly & put the morning incident behind him.
Towards the end of the afternoon was the Pro Superbike session, during which Louie again suffered a mishap in the exact same corner. As a result the bike suffered minor damage, very easily repairable. Following that we quickly packed up the setup & called it a day as we wanted to put our minds to rest of the day’s events.Early Saturday morning our friend Steve “Doc” Walker came by & gave Louie an overall checkup following some pain he had mentioned to me. As a result he was told he had a couple of broken ribs & maybe a broken finger, but cleared to ride. (Thanks again Steve!!)
The morning practice sessions went good. The bike was dialed & Louie was on his way right back to where he had left off before Friday’s incidents, as he had put that behind him that morning.
The qualifying session for the Pro Sportbike went great, not quite getting in the times he wanted but still at least extremely close, he would start 17th for Sunday’s final.
Sunday’s morning sessions went great, we were lucky enough to have our friend Mike come& spend the day with us & help take over all of the preparations of the bikes for the race, which took a lot of stress off of me & let Louie focus a save his energy.
During lunch, all of the last minute preparations were done & both bikes were brought to hot pit lane before the pre-race events were to get under way. 12:45, rolled around & we were signalled to start roll-out procedures, once those done the national anthem was sung, the complete roll down of the grided riders was announced, then the official warm up lap was under way.
The riders came back around, for the official last Pro Sportbike start of the ’09 season, they lined up in their respected position, bikes were geared, revs were high, lights turned green & away they went. Louie had a bit of a rough start, was definitely gonna have to work to make up for it. He made up lots of time back up in corners 2 & 3 as he is very quick in those 2 corners, within a couple of laps he had made up at least 4 positions & was closing up on the next pack of riders, running his best time ever on that circuit, getting his lap times in the .07’s, when he had a minor clutch issue that caused him to run off the track, luckily was able to keep it up & get back on, loosing some positionshe definitely had more work to do to close them back up. Pretty sure from my point of view the longest 18 laps to watch but also just as exciting as sometimes I feel like I’m right there with him. He was able to make up some lost ground to finish in 17th place, definitely not where he would have finished had he not run off but still very satisfied to run some fast times after the Friday’s events.
Overall satisfied even though parts of the weekend were at times turbulent & stressfull. Next round for the team is scheduled for sept. 25th-27th for the last R.A.C.E. regional round.
As always a huge thanks to all the people that are behind us: Moto Newman, Importations Thibault, Suomy, Litho Select, EBC brakes, Pirelli, Orion Motorsports & PhotoActive. As well as a special personal thanks to Mike Garneau, Steve “Doc Walker, Robyn & Frank Raffa & Faye & Barry Oakley.
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